Previews

Stronghold Legends

If there's one thing better than building castles, it's knocking them down.

Spiffy:

If there's one thing better than building castles, it’s knocking them down.

Iffy:

Can real-time strategy live in peace with RTS?

"It's a sister title to the Stronghold games," says Firefly designer Simon Bradbury of Stronghold Legends. There's still castle-building, with the economic system that characterized the games. But this time, the RTS elements get more than just a token nod. In fact, based on the demo we watched at E3, you might not even have guessed that you were looking at a castle-building game.

There are three races based on legendary folks who might, you know, build castles. King Arthur, Siegfried, and Dracula each have their own structures and armies. "It's fantasy as it really was," Bradbury says, "in the heads of the peasants and villagers."

A bunch of soldiers surround and beat up a dragon. Then some Rhinemaidens use a tunnel network to get across the map. There are dragon harpoons, a Queen of Winter casting her ice beam, and a tiny little Merlin flinging lightning bolts. It's not the sort of RTS where you can zoom in and admire the character models. There's very much an old school sense of tiny people bustling around with you hovering high overhead, looking down. This also helps the sense of scale quite a bit, as castle walls are really towering castle walls.

A dragon freezes an army that's attacking it. Dracula's fire imps charge at a formation of archers, trailing flames on the ground behind them. A giant stands in front of a castle gate and bangs his club against it, slowly draining its health. "It's not revolutionary," Bradbury admits, "but it's RTS-like. Everything we're doing is to make a strong RTS."

Bradbury illustrates how to counter the classic Stronghold stalemate of towers brimming with archers holding the enemy at bay. "We're going to fix archer dominance once and for all," he says. A kamikaze bat dives into a formation of archers, knocking them every which way. A black dragon burns up a bunch of them. Something called a creeper rushes up to a tower stocked with archers. "He's impervious to arrow fire," Bradbury explains. The creeper climbs the tower and uses his special power to convert the archers to his own side. This is a demo for people who hate archers.

Further along in the demo, King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table come out. They each have glowing icons underneath their feet to illustrate that they're no ordinary units. Each of them has a special ability. There's a vision power to reveal traps, a summoned angel that heals units, and the obligatory giant fireball attack. The demo ends with a pre-rendered cinematic of a couple of werewolves using a catapult to infiltrate a castle. At least inasmuch as being thrown over a wall can be considered "infiltrating." Stronghold Legends is currently scheduled for release in fall 2006.